“Ratfucking” is the art of carrying out dirty tricks and crafty maneuvers, usually in the name of winning an election.

FIRST KNOWN USE 1974, All the President’s Men (Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein)

So we’ve all seen the video of Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed dealing with Tommy, a MAGA GOP plant looking for a Fox News gotcha moment, at a recent Q&A session with Michigan Democratic voters. Here it is again, just for the joy of watching the takedown:

Everyone has figured out by now that Tommy was sent to this by the GOP to create a negative soundbite that MAGA propaganda channels would run over and over again, because their moronic viewers have the mindset: “Muslim BAD!! ME HATE MUSLIM!!!”

We knew immediately that Tommy was a GOP plant out on a ratfucking mission. We just didn’t know who was the lead trainer of the ratfucker.

Now we do (from the Guardian):

A man who heckled the Democratic candidate for Senate Abdul El-Sayed and demanded he disavow the Muslim Brotherhood at a Michigan town hall is a former aide to the Republican senator Josh Hawley, according to congressional staff records.

At the event on Saturday, an attender who gave his name only as “Tommy” shouted from the crowd, asking whether El-Sayed would disavow the movement. El-Sayed answered: “Sure, yeah, absolutely,” then turned the question around, asking whether the man assumed he wouldn’t.

Tommy said he had simply not heard El-Sayed reject the Muslim Brotherhood, one of the Arab world’s oldest and most influential Islamist movements. Under Trump the US has moved to designate certain chapters of the group as foreign terrorist organizations.

Over nearly five minutes at the town hall, El-Sayed pointed to how the question shouted by Tommy carried an implication of “dual loyalty”, comparing it with the doubts once raised about John F Kennedy’s Catholicism, and told the room he was running for the Senate and “happen[s] to be Muslim”.

He then asked Tommy whether he would disavow any attempt to read religious doctrine into American law. Tommy said he would not. El-Sayed answered that it was Tommy who needed to understand the constitution, drawing cheers, and the man left the room.

The questioner has since been identified as Thomas Teepell, whose staff records show he joined Hawley’s office as an intern in 2023 and rose to operations director before leaving in February. He then became political director for Philip Sarnecki’s Kansas gubernatorial campaign. Sarnecki lost the Republican primary on 4 August.

Teepell is the son of the Republican strategist Timmy Teepell, a longtime adviser to Hawley and the former Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal. The Handbasket first reported the identification.

So to recap: Tommy isn’t from Michigan. He has been a MAGA plant in Missouri, Louisiana and Kansas. And he perfected his trade under Josh Hawley, who doesn’t represent Michigan at all, but has trained stooges to go into other states to screw up their elections.

You remember what Josh Hawley did when his MAGA moron ilk stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6?

That’s right. Josh Hawley is a yellow-bellied coward who didn’t march up to his snarling rabid followers and say, “knock it off you fucking morons.” He turned tail and ran (probably crying “Mommy, help me!” with every step) then went outside, after Capitol police had saved his ass, and gave a fist bump to the rioters he was to scared to confront.

There is nothing but rot in the Republican Party. We need to get out and vote on Nov. 3 to put an end to its perfidy and destruction of democracy.